Picture is brighter for off-the-track thoroughbreds

For many thoroughbreds, the end of their racing career is not the end of the line.

Some horses, like Belmont Stakes winner Arcangelo, retire to a stud career at a high-end farm. The 3-year-old, who racked up more than $1.7 million in earnings and a was favorite for this year’s Breeders’ Cup Classic, was retired after developing a hoof problem. 2020 Eclipse Award-winning sprinter Whitmore, well known at Oaklawn Park for his multiple stakes wins and track record, is spending retirement developing his skills as a show horse. 

At the other end of the spectrum are the horses that end up in kill pens, with rescuers turning to social media desperately seeking buyers and donations to save the horses’ lives. 

In between are thousands of horses looking for new homes and new careers when racing is no longer their game. The big questions of “can this horse do anything but run?” or “how much should I pay for a horse off the track?” helped spur a study published earlier this year in the journal Animals: “Factors Affecting Thoroughbred Online Auction Prices in Non/Post-racing Careers.”

The study examined the pricing and consumer preferences for off-the-track-thoroughbreds, or OTTBs. In reflecting on the study, the authors also said that the landscape for former racehorses is looking brighter.

The study

Michelle Kibler, Jennie Ivey and Jada Thompson are co-authors of the study with former Illinois State University graduate student Madalynn Camp. Kibler is an associate professor at Illinois State University; Ivey is an associate professor/equine extension specialist at the University of Tennessee Institute of Agriculture, and Thompson is an assistant professor in agricultural economics for the University of Arkansas System Division of Agriculture, who provided the economic modeling for the study.

The researchers examined 170 sales postings for OTTBs between 2012 and 2020 from 39 online auctions.

“When people call me as a specialist, they’re asking, ‘What do you think could be a reasonable price to look for in a horse? Or what should I sell this horse for that is fair, but still makes me some money?’” Ivey said.

“We don’t always have a great idea as to what the market prices for horses are, so this is how this project came to be,” she said.

“And it’s hard, because I like to go back to the science and go back to the literature to give them an answer, and there’s just not a lot on sale prices,” Ivey said. “So to me, the biggest thing for this study was that I actually have something to say.”

What Camp, Kibler, Ivey and Thompson found is that the mean price for the horses was $2,439.12. The lowest bid they found was for $100, while the highest was $20,000.

They also found that age affected the sales price. The mean age of horses sold in the auctions they studied was 8.64 years old, with the youngest horse being a yearling and the oldest clocking in at 20 years of age.

When it came to consumer preferences, the researchers found that “a horse’s sale price peaks at age 9 and then begins to decrease thereafter.” Sex also made a difference: mares drew an average of $924.08 less than geldings on the market.

Color was a factor too. “A trend for chestnut and gray or roan horses to be valued over $1,000 more than bay, brown, or black horses was detected,” the study said.

The researchers also found buyers preferred horses registered with the U.S. Equestrian Federation, the U.S. Hunter Jumper Association, or the U.S. Eventing Association.

As far as second careers or experience potential information in the listings, jumper was the most commonly reported, followed by hunter under saddle and trail riding.

“Affordable, but a really quality option”

For riders who like to compete, Kibler said that “thoroughbreds are affordable compared to a lot of these other breeds. Warmblood breeds tend to have these higher price tags attached to them, but thoroughbreds are as athletic as these other breeds, and you can still compete them at very high levels. They’re affordable, but a really quality option.”

Warmbloods have risen to prominence in the last few decades, excelling at Olympic equine disciplines such as dressage and three-day eventing.

Past attitudes about thoroughbreds being high-strung and difficult for owners to manage are being dispelled, thanks in part, to better methods of helping the horses wind down from racing life.

“They’re coming off the track and having to spend some time being let down,” Kibler said. “That transition time period is really important. We’ve kind of really refined the best ways, best practices for how to make that transition really successful for them.”

In addition to their athleticism, there are lessons from a racehorse’s past that can make everyday life easier in a second career.

“I think that there’s been a lot of education out there of buyers of these horses, not just about that transition period, but also the amount of things that they’re exposed to on the race track,” Kibler said. “If you’ve ever been to the track, there is a lot of stuff that goes on. There’s the crowd yelling, the amount of handling that they’re getting. They’ve been trailered a lot. They’ve had a lot of veterinary work. They’re used to those things.”

Rabbit hole

The OTTB study was a follow-up to one the researchers conducted on stock horse prices. However, the modeling being used to make sense of the data originated in a completely different place.

Thompson, an economist specializing in the poultry industry, is the first to tell you she’s not a horse person. However, Thompson had an idea about a way to manage disease data for livestock.

She asked Kibler if there was a way that data could be used to determine some measure of productivity in horses.

“We never figured out how to make that angle work and it’s on the back burner,” Thompson said. “But that discussion led us to this study.”

“You know, they’re only racing for a short amount of time, but that doesn’t mean they’re not valuable anymore. There is a second life for them,” Thompson said. “And I think the more that we provide education and information on that, the more it will help those horses live better lives as well.”